Redefining Reality
When Case, the protagonist of Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer jacks himself into the cyberspace, he embodies the paradigm that has always defined the way we see the digital world. There is a clear distinction between the real or physical world and the online world. The online world may be prosaic and made up of lines of typed text in a chat room—embellished at best by fonts and emojis, or it may be a virtual three-dimensional (3D) world such as was attempted by Second Life, and promised to us as the metaverse, by Facebook. Or in the realms of imagination—in literature and movies, such as Avatar, it may be a very lifelike environment with its own set of social and physical rules. This distinction ...
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